Mental health is not the human default.
That uncomfortable fact was stated with icy clarity by Peter Wessel Zapffe and quietly ignored ever since. Psychological stability is an achievement, not a given. It is produced by filters, illusions, routines, shared stories, and limits. Remove those and you do not get liberation. You get exposure.
Modern society has done exactly that. Systematically. Proudly.
Émile Durkheim diagnosed suicide not as a private failure, but as a social symptom. When norms dissolve and integration fails, people die not because they are weak, but because the structure that once held them together no longer exists. His mistake was stopping at the individual. He did not push the logic to its institutional conclusion.
Not metaphorical suicide. Structural suicide.
A civilisation survives by regulating anxiety, aggression, desire, and death-awareness. Traditions do not exist because they are morally pure or philosophically true. They exist because they absorb psychic pressure. They give people scripts, roles, boundaries. They make fragility livable.
Modern Western society has declared war on exactly those mechanisms.
Traditions are treated as suspect by default. Boundaries are reframed as violence. Continuity is pathologised as nostalgia. Identity is liquefied and then moralised. Meaning is outsourced to process. Belonging is replaced with administration.
This produces what Durkheim called anomie. Not freedom, but disorientation. Not choice, but paralysis. A society without legitimate norms does not become flexible. It becomes brittle.
The result is visible everywhere to anyone willing to look without moral cosmetics.
People are lonelier than ever, yet surrounded by others. They are materially comfortable, yet existentially exhausted. They drive expensive cars through neighbourhoods they no longer trust, live in states they no longer believe in, and consume narratives they privately despise.
This is not hypocrisy. It is late-stage adaptation.
Collapse does not begin with ruins. It begins with hyperfunctionality without legitimacy.
Late Soviet society demonstrated this with brutal clarity. By the final decades, almost nobody believed the ideology anymore. Not the population. Not the bureaucracy. Often not even the Party. Marxism-Leninism survived as ritual language, not conviction. It was recited to signal safety, not truth.
What remained was structure without belief.
The ministries functioned. The police functioned. The army functioned. The missile silos functioned perfectly. The system retained full technical capacity to destroy, even as it lost the capacity to persuade, inspire, or bind. Faith collapsed. Machinery did not.
That combination is not stability. It is danger.
Everyone knew the system was hollow. Everyone acted as if it were real. That gap became the operating principle of the state. Language emptied out. Performance replaced loyalty. Power grew more formal, more procedural, more paranoid.
The danger was not fanaticism. It was emptiness plus infrastructure.
The Western Roman Empire followed the same pattern. It did not fall because its systems stopped working. Roads were maintained. Taxes were collected. Titles retained prestige. Administration persisted. What failed was not function, but authority. The state could no longer reliably command loyalty, sacrifice, or belief.
When legitimacy erodes, systems do not disappear. They become transferable.
Groups that later entered Roman territory did not destroy a coherent civilisation. They moved into an emptied framework whose administrative forms still carried utility. Roman law, offices, and procedures were preserved where possible, even as they were simplified and repurposed.
The collapse had already happened. It just had not yet looked like collapse.
This is why decline is so difficult to recognise from within. Continuity is mistaken for health. Procedure is confused with meaning. The lights stay on. Salaries are paid. Interfaces remain familiar. What survives is not a civilisation, but an empty framework awaiting occupation.
Migration enters this picture not as a cause, but as an accelerant. A confident society integrates newcomers by transmitting itself. A hollow society can only process them bureaucratically. When there is nothing coherent to join, integration becomes impossible by definition. Resentment multiplies on all sides, and the system responds with more procedure, more language policing, more moral theatre.
Durkheim’s suicide types now operate simultaneously at scale.
Egoistic suicide through radical individualism and social atomisation.
Anomic suicide through norm collapse and identity churn.
Fatalistic suicide through algorithmic governance and bureaucratic suffocation.
Altruistic suicide through self-erasure in the name of abstract causes that demand loyalty but offer no shelter.
This is not a crisis of values. It is the absence of any values strong enough to regulate behaviour without constant coercion.
Zapffe understood what most modern theorists refuse to face: humans cannot live in permanent exposure to meaninglessness. When symbolic filters are dismantled faster than institutional replacements can form, pathology follows. Anxiety becomes ambient. Depression becomes rational. Rage looks for an object.
What is called a mental health epidemic is not a medical mystery. It is the predictable psychological output of a civilisation that dismantled its own symbolic immune system while hollowing out the legitimacy of its institutions, then congratulated itself for the courage.
A society commits suicide when it delegitimises the structures that once made human weakness survivable, while insisting that something better will spontaneously emerge from openness, process, and procedural fairness alone.
Nothing does.
What emerges instead is exhaustion disguised as tolerance, decay sold as progress, and a population trained to mistrust everything except consumption and compliance.
The most revealing sign is not despair.
It is normality.